by Mick Wall
Dave’s own constitutional inability to take a holiday ensured he was not out of the spotlight for long. In November 2008, he presented an award to the surviving members of Led Zeppelin at a ceremony held by GQ magazine in London. A month later, he appeared at the annual Kennedy Center Honors in New York, paying tribute to that year’s inductees, The Who, and leading a rollicking version of their 1978 hit ‘Who are You’ as Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey looked on from the balcony.
In the year of the US presidential election, there was also a run-in with the Republican candidate John McCain. Despite his father’s former job as a political speechwriter, Dave had spent his life publicly avoiding politics. But when McCain used the Foos’ 1997 song ‘My Hero’ as a campaign track, Dave decided enough was enough.
‘The saddest thing about this is that “My Hero” was written as a celebration of the common man and his extraordinary potential,’ said the band in a statement. ‘To have it appropriated without our knowledge and used in a manner that perverts the original sentiment of the lyrics just tarnishes the song.’
According to the Washington Post, the McCain campaign duly noted that the song was used properly under blanket licensing (which does not require the artist’s permission), and all proper royalties were paid.
But Dave had something far bigger on his plate than living out his Roger Daltrey fantasies or tackling errant US politicians. He had long harboured plans to work on ‘a sweet little side project’ with his old friend, Queens of the Stone Age’s leader, Josh Homme. Except the scale of the Foo Fighters’ success meant there was no such thing as ‘a sweet little side project’ any more. Certainly not given the line-up Dave was considering.
‘The next project that I’m trying to initiate involves me on drums, Josh Homme on guitar, and John Paul Jones playing bass,’ he had told Mojo magazine back in 2005. ‘That wouldn’t suck bratwurst.’ Three years on, his fantasy supergroup was about to become a reality. The first step had been when Dave presented Zeppelin with their GQ award. ‘I think by then my nerves had gone away, and I realised I could consider Jones a friend,’ Dave recalled. ‘I rang Josh from the airport and said, “Hey man, I’m going to ask John Paul Jones if he’ll jam with us.”’
In the vast round hole that was Led Zeppelin, Jones was the closest thing they had to a square peg. The bassist was the original ‘quiet one’ – a crack musician and arranger who had no truck with the rock’n’roll clichés that swirled around Zeppelin. After his former band split up in 1980, he went on to work with a dizzyingly diverse array of collaborators, among them the British goth band The Mission, US alt rock giants R.E.M. and Greek-American avant-garde diva Diamanda Galás. Like Dave, he was a man constantly in search of new experiences and new collaborators.
By the start of 2009, a year after Zeppelin’s triumphal comeback gig at the O2 in London, Jones found himself in a strange position. With Robert Plant unwilling to commit to a full-blown reunion, as originally planned, the band were in limbo. Jones and Jimmy Page had tested the water with various replacement singers, including Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Myles Kennedy of a rising US rock band, Alter Bridge, but it had all come to nothing. When Dave invited Jonesy to his birthday in LA, he had an ulterior motive.
‘I had my fortieth birthday party at a Medieval Times restaurant, watching men from Long Beach, California, pretend they’re English knights,’ Dave told Q. ‘I invited two hundred of my friends and we reserved the whole bar. We were drinking chalices of Coors Light and eating with our hands. They make the birthday announcements in the middle of the show: “We’d like to wish a happy birthday to Bryan! He’s seven today! And Lucas, who’s sixteen! And Dave! He’s turning … forty?!” That was quite a night.’
Dave cunningly seated Jonesy next to Josh on what he called ‘a blind date’. If the two didn’t get on, there would be no band. Fortunately, they hit it off straight away. ‘Dave never mentioned John to me until December, and I didn’t even believe him until January,’ added Homme. ‘What was good about Medieval Times was that there was no risk of pretension. It broke the ice. With a lance.’
For Dave, the prospect of forming a dream supergroup with two musicians he knew and hugely admired was more than just wishful thinking. Just as joining Queens of the Stone Age earlier in the decade had provided him with a vital release valve, so this new band would help relieve the pressure of being the boss of Foo Fighters, Inc. Two days after their chalice-quaffing night out at Medieval Times, the three men met clandestinely at Homme’s Pink Duck studio, located on the aptly named Stoner Avenue in Burbank. ‘It was white knuckles,’ Dave recalled. ‘It was like cramming for a test. To be honest, I was fucking nervous. It was just a blur. But the second jam it was like, this is on. It had a real forward motion to it, and I think we all understood we had to grab hold of it.’
A few days later, Jones had to fly back to the UK. It gave everyone time to mull over what they’d done and work out if it had a future. Dave and Josh turned to each other and asked: ‘OK, should we be a band?’ The answer, unequivocally, was ‘yes’ – something, to their relief and delight, Jones agreed with when they spoke to him.
The trio didn’t waste any time getting started, entering Pink Duck in February 2009. The set-up couldn’t have been simpler: Josh Homme on guitar and vocals, John Paul Jones on bass and all manner of keyboards, Dave Grohl back behind the drum kit, where he was most comfortable in this setting. Originally calling themselves Caligula until they discovered, as Dave put it, ‘about seven other fucking bands called the same thing’, they eventually settled on Them Crooked Vultures as ‘a name of no significance’ for their new group.
For Dave and Josh, it was a welcome opportunity to break from the readily identifiable sound of their day jobs. Them Crooked Vultures were driven by a lack of boundaries. Here, anything went, from sludge-metal noise to James Brown-influenced funk grooves. ‘The only reason you have for doing it is the pure love, joy and thrill of collaborating with the other people in the room,’ Dave explained. ‘Because of that I wanted to do some crazy stuff that I’d never done before.’
But there was an elephant in the room. John Paul Jones had been one half of the greatest rhythm section in the history of rock, alongside John Bonham. While Dave could hardly contain his excitement at playing alongside one of his heroes, he knew that it would be foolish to try and fill Bonham’s shoes. ‘I relieved myself of the pressure of playing with John by thinking, “Okay, obviously I am not going to be the best drummer he has ever played with; I’m not even going to try to be!!” So it was easy that way and honestly, while we were recording or jamming, I just wanted to entertain the other guys and do something that might make them laugh, might make their jaws drop, or might take them by surprise.’
The fact that a trio of high-profile musicians had joined forces wasn’t a surprise. All three of them thrived on collaborations and keeping things fresh. What was a shock was the fact that they did it all in secret. They may have been in three of the most successful rock bands of their respective generations, but the world at large didn’t have a clue that it was happening at all. Dave, for one, didn’t want anything to distract from what they were doing. ‘We had this wonderful opportunity and we didn’t want to see it tarnished by anything from the outside.’
Not that Dave was in any danger of becoming a Howard Hughes-style recluse. In March 2009, he appeared on ‘Run with the Wolves’, a pummelling track from the latest album by British dance-punk overlords The Prodigy. The collaboration came about over a year earlier, after Dave told Prodigy’s mainman, Liam Howlett, that he wanted to get back behind the drum kit. Howlett called his presence on the album ‘inspiring’. The same month, Dave popped up on the US comedian Greg Proops’s TV chat show, where, poker-faced, he recited the lyrics to the famously OTT metal band Manowar’s song ‘Gloves of Metal’ and ‘All Men Play on Ten’ as if they were the greatest works of poetry ever written. Keeping a commendably straight face he recited such immortal lines as: ‘While I’m burnin
g up my gear, there’s a fire in your ear / That won’t stop until the day you die…’
Them Crooked Vultures were the main focus of his attention now, though. On 9 August, six months after they had first rehearsed at Josh’s Pink Duck, the three musicians broke their self-imposed vow of silence with their first public appearance, a low-key show at Chicago’s Metro Club. Despite little advance fanfare, word inevitably leaked out and the midnight show was thronged as the new band ploughed through an 80-minute set comprised of nothing but Them Crooked Vulture originals.
‘The reason people came is because I’m in the Foo Fighters, Josh is from Queens and John was in Led Zeppelin,’ Dave observed in Drummer. ‘But nobody had heard any of the music, not a note. Everyone had these huge expectations because of our reputations, but they didn’t know what to expect; we had managed to protect the project and we gave people a unique experience. For that hour and a half those people just sat, watched and listened.’ It was at that gig that Dave realised that Them Crooked Vultures was more than just a group of A-list rock stars jamming together – that it was a band. ‘After that first gig, I just wanted to do it again,’ he said.
He soon got his wish. Less than two weeks after their live debut, an untrumpeted slot opening for the British indie rock upstarts the Arctic Monkeys in London introduced them to European audiences. In October 2009, they kicked off a world tour; their self-titled debut album followed on 16 November.
Dave told the NME that the album was ‘the most exciting thing I’ve done in my entire life’. Jones took things even further: ‘It’s a dream. It’s like the old Zeppelin days.’ Ironically, given all their talk about dispensing with boundaries, it sounded suspiciously like Queens of the Stone Age with a turbo-charged rhythm section, though that was hardly a hindrance: the album entered the Top 15 on both sides of the Atlantic. Dave’s great adventure with Them Crooked Vultures would take him all the way through to the end of October 2010. During that time, all three members said they were keen to record a follow-up album, though it has yet to materialise.
Typically, TCV wasn’t the only thing Dave had on his plate. In April 2009, Dave’s wife, Jordyn, had given birth to the couple’s second daughter, Harper Willow. And then there was the day job. Where his stint with Queens of the Stone Age in 2002 had been a result of his unhappiness with the Foo Fighters’ internal machinations, Them Crooked Vultures were fuelled by the excitement of three musicians at the top of their respective games sparking off each other. ‘The Foo Fighters have always been my priority,’ he told Classic Rock magazine. ‘The bond that we have as people is even stronger than the bond we have as a band. The Vultures was like going off and fucking some beautiful chick for a while, but there’s no way that I would feel the love that I have for my wife or my family with some hot fucking girl.’
Indeed, Dave hadn’t forgotten about the Foo Fighters. The band had started working on new songs during soundchecks on the Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace tour. When that trek ended, they went straight into Hollywood’s Grand Master Studios to record the 13 new numbers they had come up with. ‘Rather than just forget about them or letting them sit around until we were ready to make another album we thought, “Let’s go in and put them to tape now,”’ he explained.
At first he had toyed with the idea of simply releasing the new songs without fanfare, promotion or even an accompanying tour – the sort of thing David Bowie would do to great effect four years later. But Dave felt that something wasn’t quite right. The songs weren’t ready, for starters. Plus the idea of the Foo Fighters putting out a record and not doing anything on the back of it was unthinkable. ‘We wouldn’t be able to just sit around at home if we had a new album out, and ultimately we just want to go out and play, so rather than jump back into another cycle of things, it felt like a good idea to stop,’ said Dave. ‘So we recorded that shit and stopped.’
But Dave couldn’t leave the Foos alone entirely during his time in the studio with Them Crooked Vultures. At one point, he was shuttling between material for both bands. But the sheer workload he’d taken on caused another problem. Midway through recording Them Crooked Vultures’ album, Dave had a health scare. Between working simultaneously on the Vultures and the Foos, as well as being kept awake most nights by his newborn baby, Dave reckoned he was only getting about three hours’ sleep a night. Something had to give – and he ended up being rushed to the local ER when his wife feared some heavy chest pains might be the start of a heart attack. ‘They ran all these tests on me,’ he later recalled, ‘did X-rays, and then finally turned round and told me that I needed to stop drinking so much coffee!’
But the songs the Foo Fighters had recorded at the end of 2008 weren’t entirely wasted. The same month as Them Crooked Vultures released their debut album, the Foo Fighters issued their first greatest hits record. It was a decision their leader wasn’t entirely comfortable with. The band’s record company had been pressuring him for a compilation Foos album ever since One by One, but Dave had resisted the idea, calling them ‘the kiss of death’. But now the label was demanding one, and Dave was contractually obliged to deliver. That was what he told the media anyway. ‘It seems premature, because we’re still a functioning band,’ he told Radio 1. ‘These things can look like an obituary. I think there are better songs than some of those [on the album].’ What he was reluctant to explain was that, as the head of his own label, he wasn’t ‘contractually obliged’ to do any such thing. But there would be a four-year gap between Echoes and the next Foo Fighters album, and Dave knew he needed to plug the gap somehow. For all their bold words about how brilliant the Vultures album was, it hadn’t sold even half what a normal Foo Fighters album would be expected to. With the Foos’ Greatest Hits released the same month as Them Crooked Vultures, Dave had shrewdly ensured he would once again be having his cake and eating every last mouthful of it too. When the Vultures album failed to sell anywhere near as many copies as Greatest Hits, plans to record a follow-up were quietly shelved while Dave turned his attention to resurrecting his career with his own ‘real’ band.
Partly to ease his conscience and ensure that long-time fans weren’t getting completely ripped off, Dave decided to add two brand-new tracks that had been written on the last Foos tour: the billowing, Tom Petty-esque ‘Wheels’ and the snarling pop-thrash of ‘Word Forward’. The former song was released as a single a few weeks before the album’s release, but it had received its world premiere when the Foo Fighters broke their hiatus to play an Independence Day concert honouring military veterans on the White House lawn – the first of many appearances that Dave and the band would make at the most famous residence in America.
Significantly, both ‘Wheels’ and ‘Word Forward’ had been re-recorded for the Greatest Hits album with Butch Vig, the man who had produced Nirvana’s Nevermind nearly 20 years earlier. Dave had bumped into Vig at a party earlier in the year and asked if he was interested in the pair working together again. ‘We had so much fun doing it,’ Vig told Rolling Stone of the sessions. ‘We realised we hadn’t worked together on an album since Nevermind – and he goes, “Dude, man, do you want to make the next Foo Fighters record?”’
Dave would prove to be a man of his word, but that was a few months away. Before that, there was the small matter of bidding farewell to 12 months in which he’d formed a band with two of his closest friends and musical inspirations and welcoming in the New Year. This he did dressed as Olivia Newton-John at a fancy dress party themed around the Seventies musical Grease thrown at Studio 606 West. For once, Dave was able to let his hair down – even if that hair was in the form of a fetching blond wig. But beyond the usual Christmas break, there was no chance of a holiday – nor did Dave want one. ‘My life is a fucking holiday,’ he declared. ‘I don’t need a vacation from the adoration.’
Luckily for him, the first half of 2010 was as busy as the last few years had been. Them Crooked Vultures’ world tour would take them through to the end of July, when they played their last major g
ig at the huge Mount Fuji Festival in Japan. The tour was punctuated by the sort of disparate and occasionally bizarre events that only a man like Dave Grohl would encounter. On 2 June, he made his second visit to the White House in less than a year when Paul McCartney received the prestigious Gershwin Award for Popular Song from the Library of Congress. In front of President Barack Obama, the ex-Beatle sitting next to him was honoured with an all-star ceremony which featured Dave covering the classic Wings song ‘Band on the Run’ and culminated in an all-star finale of ‘Hey Jude’ which saw McCartney, Dave, Stevie Wonder, Jack White and the night’s other big stars joined by the President and his wife, Michelle. ‘We went upstairs to meet him before the gig,’ Dave recalled. ‘His wife is gorgeous, man. She has the air of a president whereas Obama has the vibe of a laid-back surfer. He really puts you in a good mood.’
Even weirder was an offer Dave got to play on an unfinished song by Michael Jackson, the erstwhile King of Pop who had died the previous year. Dave met funk rock star Lenny Kravitz at a film awards ceremony in early 2010. Kravitz informed him that he had an incomplete song he’d worked on with Jackson in 1992 called ‘(I Can’t Make It) Another Day’. Did Dave fancy playing drums on it? Of course he did.
Dave and Butch Vig worked on a massive-sounding drum track. ‘I sent it to Lenny and he’s, like, “Dude, this is going to be awesome,”’ said Dave. And then … nothing. Dave never heard back from Kravitz again. Then he stumbled across the track in question online. ‘You know what they used?’ he said, dumbfounded. ‘One snare hit. That’s it. I don’t know who’s playing drums on it, but it ain’t me. It says: “Featuring Dave Grohl”. And it’s like: “It does? I can’t hear me in that!”’
